Attics are all very well and good when they're being used for storage and you don't have to think about them all that much — but what if you woke one morning to find that the hatch had been...disturbed?
This was the unpleasant scenario 30-year-old freelance artist and store owner Loppy Rae from Tennessee, U.S., found themselves in recently. And it only got worse from there.
"So, this morning I went into the garage and noticed the attic was wide open. We don’t use it and it’s a heavy panel, so I was freaked out already but trying to play it cool for my kid," wrote Rae on X (formerly Twitter). "But tell me why my 5yo stared straight into the darkness and said “a man lives there.”
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Nope, nope, nope.
At the time of writing, that post has over 5,000 shares and 13 million views.
Rae went on to share an image of the open attic hatch — along with a new detail they'd only just noticed.
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"The attic in question and tell me why I just noticed the fucking black handprint I’m SCREAMING," they wrote.
Rae confirmed in a later post that their husband has been up in the attic to have a look, but there's nothing there.
"For the handprint, the only explanation i can think of is that it’s leftover from when we got a home inspection last year," Rae told Mashable. "We just purchased this house a little over a year ago. Neither my husband nor I have been up to the attic since we moved in, since we don’t really have a lot of things to store. It’s completely empty, aside from the insulation. Technically, this is the second time we have found the latch open without explanation. The first time, I admittedly thought my husband was just messing with me."
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Rae said the internet is convinced they have a phrogger — a person who secretly hides in another person's home. But Rae isn't so sure. "With all due respect, we live out in the middle of nowhere. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone just wandering around out here in the sticks, especially with all the recent bear sightings in our town. And if it is truly a person, he’d have to be pretty dumb to leave the latch open."
Rae said they haven't heard any noises coming from the attic, but that they sleep with ear plugs in anyway.
"My kid, on the other hand, mentioned that he heard banging above his bed. This was after the attic had already been closed up again."
As a last ditch effort to work out what's going on, they've now set up a camera in the garage.
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"I only set the camera up last night, so I’m afraid that I don’t have much in terms of updates. When these things happen, people are always eager for updates, but I think it’s funny that the only way we would have an update is if something bad were to happen," Rae said.
"As for my son…he has mentioned the man multiple times, but it’s hard to make sense of what he’s saying. He doesn’t watch horror movies and he’s never out of our sight for long. I don’t know where the idea of a man in the attic came from. He talks about his imaginary friends often, and it’s hard to determine what’s nonsense and what isn’t. It’s all unsettling nonetheless."
